Fifth Street Finance buys HQ in Greenwich

Tim Loh

Published 9:49 pm, Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Fifth Street Finance is moving from White Plains, N.Y., to 777 W. Putnam Ave., in Greenwich, after buying the 130,000-square-foot office building that once was the home of Nestle Waters North America. Tenants include Marc Fisher Footwear and Musden Financial. Contributed photo.
Photo: Contributed Photo

GREENWICH -- Fifth Street Finance Corp., the $2 billion money-lending enterprise that raised eyebrows last month when it announced plans to relocate operations to Connecticut, has secured its new headquarters on this town's western flank.

The publicly traded company, currently based out of White Plains, N.Y., completed the $38.85 million purchase earlier this month of 777 West Putnam Ave., a three-story, 126,000-square-foot facility built in 1972 that spreads over 8 acres, in part crossing over the New York state line.

The complex, which was sold by Gateway Park Associates LLC, was previously home to Nestle Waters North America. That operation left Greenwich for Stamford about four years ago. The largest tenant currently present is women's fashion brand Marc Fisher Footwear, which will stay in place, according to Fifth Street's management.

Principals for Gateway Park Associates declined to comment for this story.

For Fifth Street, the purchase was sweetened by a basket of incentives from the state of Connecticut. The firm will receive a 10-year, $4 million loan from the state Department of Economic and Community Development to help it build out about 44,000 square feet of the class-A office building. Of that loan, $3 million is forgivable. The company will also receive a $500,000 grant for job training and a $500,000 grant to install a fuel cell, wind or solar-powered energy system.

The 10-year binding deal requires the firm to over time roughly double its initial introduction of some 50 employees to Connecticut.

"We should be in there next summer, probably July," said James Velgot, Fifth Street's executive director of marketing and brand management, reached by phone Tuesday after several meetings with state officials in Hartford. "I'd say probably by next year, we'll have somewhere between 60 and 70 people in there."

The heart of Fifth Street's business is helping finance the acquisitions and re-capitalizations of small and midsized businesses by private-equity firms. The company is publicly traded on Nasdaq with a market capitalization of about $1.26 billion and nearly $2 billion of assets under management.

It currently employs about 60 people in its offices in New York, Chicago, California and Greenwich.

"It's a great trajectory," Velgot said of his three years at the firm. "Our headcount has doubled, our assets under management have more than doubled, and our market capitalization has more than doubled."

Finding a new home took about 1.5 years, he said.

"We'd been through (leases) so often, where the building wasn't right," he said, "where people would start doing construction and it'd be noisy when we tried to do meetings -- we'd rather be in control of our destiny."

The building is attractive for a corporation like Fifth Street, said Robert Vincent Sisca, the attorney who represented the firm in the purchase. "It's really accessible to New York City, to Stamford, to White Plains and Greenwich proper," Sisca said. "There's significant parking available and it's not far off of Interstate 95."

He added: "The property itself is beautiful, inside and out. And 130,000 square feet is not small."